


Shitty's Shovel Talk Started It

by Itgoeson



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-01
Updated: 2017-07-01
Packaged: 2018-11-21 18:00:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11362698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Itgoeson/pseuds/Itgoeson
Summary: “Look,” Shitty starts, making eye contact and holding it. Holding it, like, an unnervingly long time. He keeps at it as he starts to talk. “Jack’s a puppy. He’s a big, hairy, excitable puppy who sometimes still pees on the carpet.”Bitty’s afraid to ask where this is going, or if Shitty’s going to blink anytime soon.“And puppies forget that the person who walks them isn’t the only person in the world.”





	Shitty's Shovel Talk Started It

“Brah,” Shitty tells Bitty, pulling him into a tight hug after a particularly close game. “That last goal was ‘swasome.”

Bitty beams at him. “The frogs are getting so good, you should’ve seen Dex and Nursey in practice the other day.”

Shitty nods, one arm still around him, and leads him a little to the side, away from the team filing into the locker room. Chowder takes a half-step towards them but Bitty waves him off with a smile.

They stay like that, quiet and hovering at the edge of the hallway, until the last person clears out. Behind them, the rink quiets, settles down until all that’s left is the hum of the lights and air conditioner. Bitty smiles at Shitty. It’s rare to see him without Jack, but Jack had a game tonight, too. 

“Look,” Shitty starts, making eye contact and holding it. Holding it, like, an unnervingly long time. He keeps at it as he starts to talk. “Jack’s a puppy. He’s a big, hairy, excitable puppy who sometimes still pees on the carpet.”

Bitty’s afraid to ask where this is going, or if Shitty’s going to blink anytime soon. 

“And puppies forget that the person who walks them isn’t the only person in the world.”

“Uh, okay? Has Jack not been texting you? He knows how to Skype, I can –“

Shitty shakes his shoulder and laughs. “No, bro, we’re fine. I’m telling you that you could tell Jack to kill a man and he’d, like, forget that it’s a bad thing to do. Be careful.”

Bitty laughs. His brain is only half online after the game and now he’s dealing with Shitty’s uninterrupted eye contact and the way his arm is still slung over Bitty’s shoulders. Mixed signals.

Shitty nods. “Heavy, I know. And we’re all bros. Lards will still fuck you up if I ask, though. So just make sure to be yourself, even if it ends badly between you and Jack. Because you’re a good dude, and that’s all that really matters in relationships.”

He pats Bitty’s shoulder, pulls him in for a tight hug, and struts into the locker room to harass the guys without looking back. 

Bitty trails after him, eyes wide.

He’s stripping out of his sweat-soaked pads when Nursey shoulder bumps him softly. His eyebrows are raised, and Bitty realizes he probably still looks like the time Coach managed to knock over the entire china cabinet and stood, hands on hips, for the better part of ten minutes staring at it in shock.

And, because it’s Nursey, Bitty smiles at him and says, “I think I just got a shovel talk.”

Nursey nods and they go back to sorting out their gear.

And that’s how it starts.

///

The next weekend Bitty can wrangle time away from school is a break. Bitty awkwardly avoids telling his mama exactly why he’s not coming home, staying vague and saying he has work to do (true), that he’ll be back before she knows it (possible), and he carefully doesn’t mention hockey because, while he will be working on his game, it’ll likely only be because Jack Zimmermann works harder than God.

She’s understanding and Bitty resolves to tell her (again) about Jack, about everything. After — well, he’ll know when he needs to tell her, he reasons, and packs his bag and the recipe books he doesn’t use all that often. He shouldn’t have brought all of them to Samwell again, but it felt like a piece of home.

(He carefully doesn’t think about the fact that he is, very intentionally, taking those pieces of home with him to Jack’s place, leaving them at Jack’s, and the way they’ll never be reminders of just one home again.)

///

The bags under Jack’s eyes are big enough that Bitty would have trouble bench pressing them when he finally shoves his way into his apartment. Jack is shuffling around and helping Bitty with his duffel, fussing over him.

“Darlin, you didn’t have to stay up until two in the mornin’ just to let me in. I do have a key,” Bitty gently scolds, cupping Jack’s jaw and tilting his head down for a kiss.

Jack hums tiredly, grinning faintly. 

He’d been pulling longer hours than usual, setting up the apartment, putting in hours working with the PR team. Bitty gives him a slow once-over, noting the extra bulk on his shoulders and thighs and. 

Sleep, they both need sleep.

Bitty pushes Jack towards the bed, laughing as he curls up into a nest of blankets immediately, Bitty’s stripping to his boxers when Shitty’s words come back to him.

“Honey, if I asked you to kill a man, would you do it?”

Jack wraps his arms around his pillow and blinks up at him. “Can it wait until season’s over? Don’t have time to cover it up.”

Bitty laughs.

Jack is not laughing. He looks a little . . . puzzled?

Oh. Oh no. Shitty was right,

“Jack, baby,” he starts, smiling when Jack’s face softens at the pet name. “You wouldn’t actually kill someone for me, right?”

“Uh,” Jack says. Stalls for a suspicious amount of time. “I’d probably have a panic attack if it was too premeditated?”

Bitty decides he cannot deal with this tonight and slips into bed beside Jack.

It’s quiet, comfortable. Until Jack whispers “you’d be pretty hot as a crime boss, though.” 

Which, yes, tell Bitty something he doesn’t know. It is cute how delirious Jack gets when he’s this tired, though, so he just kisses his forehead and tells him to get some rest.

///

He doesn’t bring it up again over the weekend, or even for the half of the week Bitty’s staying at Jack’s. They do normal things, if normal couples had to avoid being photographed together in compromising positions. 

They go grocery shopping, because Jack has an odd love of chicken and Bitty’s been craving chicken nuggets. 

He’s a college kid. His NHL boyfriend works insane hours. They’re getting the damn dinosaur chicken nuggets. They’re snapchatting this to all their friends. Bitty has no shame about this. Ransom and Holster each send back snaps of each other screaming. Chowder sends a blank screen filled with hearts. Nursey replies with a chat of  _ fuq, now i want chicnugs _ that Jack stares at for moments too long before taking the phone out of Bitty’s hand with two fingers and placing it on top of his tallest cabinet.    
  
“That’s not a text I ever want to have to read with my own two eyes again,” he whispers when he settles down next to Bitty again.

“You’re such a dick, Jack,” Bitty says. Jack’s shoulders shake in a silent laugh. 

“I am sorry, though,” Jack says after his tenth chicken nugget, just as Bitty’s dramatically chomping off the head of a longneck.

“Hmm?”

“For being a dick. Sometimes.” he clarifies.

Bitty freezes. It feels like the climax of an action movie, where the warning bells are going off and lights are flashing and everyone’s running to make it out of the oddly slow-closing doors. He opens his mouth. “Oh, honey, it’s a good thing you’re pretty,” falls out. 

Jack smushes his forehead onto Bitty’s shoulder and wheezes out a laugh. It’s quiet, but only Shitty can really make him lose his shit with any kind of regularity, so Bitty calls it a win.

They get beer and wine and still eat Indian and Thai takeout on the floor watching Good Eats for the rest of the week. Bitty watches Jack carefully though. He asks Jack to get him things just because — the soda out of the fridge, a pizza he knows Jack doesn’t like, to wear an outfit he knows Jack wouldn’t usually wear. Jack will give him long searching looks or tease him, but doesn’t complain, just accommodates where he can. He orders two pizzas, doesn’t wake Bitty up for the extra run he goes on the next morning, lays in Bitty’s lap and makes him pet his hair when he does Bitty useless favors.

///

When he gets back to Samwell, Bitty drops his bag on the floor, locks his door, and calls Shitty.

“Bittay!” Lardo calls on the third ring. Bitty looks around until he realizes she’s just picked up Shitty’s phone.

“Lards?"   


“Bits?”

“Why do you have Shitty’s phone?”

“Why didn’t you go home for the holidays?”

“You know what, you radiant creature? You’ve explained enough. I feel like a well-informed man with no questions other than maybe where Shitty might be.”

She laughs, soft and charmed. “Yeah, yeah. I’ll be seeing you soon enough. You can convince me with pie and coffee.”

“As long as you make the coffee.”

“Then by all means, he’s right here. Shits, it’s Bitty for you.”

“Bittay!” Shitty answers, clearly mimicking Lardo. Or maybe they’ve just morphed into a single consciousness over the break. Bitty doesn’t ask, just stares resolutely at his Beyoncé poster praying for strength. 

Finally, he sighs. “Shits, did you—it’s Jack,” he interrupts himself helplessly. 

He can feel Shitty sobering up and putting on his serious face. 

Good. This is a serious problem. This is life or death—and not even his own! 

God, Bitty is so screwed. “Did you know?”

“Bittle, Eric, brah, what’d Jack do?”

“He’d kill a man for me!” Bitty tells him. He ignores the part where his voice turns into a screech. Shitty should ignore it too, he hopes. Because he can send Jack after him if he laughs. That’s a thing that Eric Bittle can do, now. 

On the other end of the line Shitty wheezes and laughs so hard it has to cause him pain. When he quiets down enough to talk, it’s just to repeat what Bitty said to Lardo, because he is a traitorous traitor who thinks Bitty’s very real issues are funny instead of, okay maybe sweet and misguided, but also horrific. 

Bitty hangs up when he hears Lardo snort from laughter and Shitty join back in.

///

“And then!” Bitty punctuates his sentence by flopping his dough over before starting to knead it again. “And then the boy goes and says that he’d kill someone for me as long as he didn’t have to think about it for too long. Now, you know I love him, but Jacque Laurant Zimmermann can be such a ridiculous man.”

Dex starts to braid together his pastry, frowning in concentration. “Yeah.”

“Bless him, but he doesn’t have the sense God gave a goose.”

Dex stares at him in confusion, looking up after a solid hour of careful work and a patient ear. Or maybe he’d been ignoring him. Bitty is too worked up to ask. “And that’s a bad thing?”

“A very bad thing! You can’t just do anything for people. He can’t just do whatever I ask him to, whenever I ask him to. He has other things to do.”

“But you’re happy.”

Bitty grunts and slaps his dough into the pan to proof. “Of course I am, but that doesn’t mean that he has to do any of this!”

“But it makes him happy,” Dex insists, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. 

And  _ oh _ .

///

“How did I not see this,” Bitty whispers, in shock.

“See what?”

“That you’re a big, hairy puppy. Shitty warned me. I practically live with you, and Shitty knew before me.  _ Everyone _ knew before me, but Shitty warned me.”

Jack gives a hushed laugh and snorts. “Course Shitty knew I get in too deep with people. I imprinted on him our freshman year and stuck that way.”

“ _ You _ imprinted on  _ him _ ?”

“I was terrified and overwhelmed and didn’t want to look like a freak. Shitty talked enough for both of us, and he only made fun of me when we were alone. He punched a guy for being rude about my anxiety the third week of school. I don’t think I ate without being with Shits or asking if he wanted to come with at least for the entire year. I still miss him when I eat mac’n’cheese.” Jack shrugs, like it’s not ground-shattering news, that Jack would be the one pining for Shitty’s company. 

“I feel like I’ve missed half your life,” Bitty tells him, eyes wide but mouth turned down at the corners. “Do I pay enough attention to you? Do I . . .” He breaks off, not wanting to ask but needing to know. Maybe Jack’s a puppy, but he’s also Bitty’s boyfriend, and he needs support and care and, in a lot of ways, he needs to be protected, too. 

“It’s not anything to do with you being a bad bro, or like, not masculine enough. We’ve just got the Bro Force. Our ‘souls are in-tune,’ or something.” And here his voices edges up an octave and speeds up a touch, shoulders straightening and chin cocked up. It’s so obviously Jack imitating Shitty that Bitty bites back a laugh and sits on his hands instead of trying to curls his hands around Jack through the laptop screen. “It’s because we, under the patriarchy, are taught that emotions are weakness and that caring for one another should be frowned upon unless it’s in hypermasculine ways; therefore, it’s easier to call it the Bro Force than it is to admit that we care about each other and have dedicated ourselves to making each other better people and care about each other’s safety enough to develop a sense for one another in the same way we do on the ice.”

Jack slumps back to his usual position, chin tucked low. Bitty laughs so hard he snorts. “That’s the Shittiest thing I’ve ever heard.”

Jack gives him a short laugh, shrugs. “We’re best friends. You learn a thing or two.”

Bitty melts. “I miss you, honey.”

“I miss you too.”

“When I see you next time,” he says wistfully, “I promise to take you on a walk and let you play fetch for as long as you want.”

“I’m divorcing you,” Jack deadpans.

“We aren’t married!”

“I’ll marry you for the express purpose of divorcing you, Bits.”

“You won’t get any treats with that attitude, sweetheart,” he says, and smirks when Jack lets out a belly laugh that fills up all the aching distance between them. 

**Author's Note:**

> can you believe this took me months to feel like i'd finished this to what i wanted it to be? ridiculous. i want it out of my drafts folder.
> 
> comments are always appreciated!


End file.
